AS THE WORLD TURNS: Parenting not something to outsource / Diversity fanatics threaten charities

News Weekly, February 21, 2009

Parenting not something to outsource

The Children's Society's report into the living conditions of young people in Britain today has published some radical thoughts.

The authors have dared to attack the prevailing "selfish and individualistic" culture of the past 20 or 30 years, which insists that both parents should work and that childcare should be outsourced. It dares to remind us that "childrearing is one of the most challenging tasks in life".

It insists that being brought up in a single-parent family is socially and emotionally damaging for children, and that they - boys and girls - need a father as well as a mother.

Parenting skills used to be passed on from one generation to another; children were raised in an extended family muddle, each family with its own method. Now, with crèches and childminders and nannies, that sequence has been broken.

American generosity is under fire. A growing number of activists and politicians argue that foundations should meet diversity targets in their giving and on their staffs. If foundations fail to diversify "voluntarily," threaten the race, ethnicity and gender enforcers, they risk legislation requiring them to do so.

In other words, the diversity police, having helped bring on the subprime meltdown through mortgage-lending quotas, now want to fix philanthropy. And instead of rebuffing this power grab, the leaders in the field have rolled over and played dead.

At the federal level, Xavier Becerra, a congressman from Los Angeles, has warned foundations: "If you don't police your own, you're going to be policed."

Mr Becerra argues that foundations' assets, because they are tax-exempt, are virtually public money. Foundations are simply private managers of those public funds, in this view, and should be responsive to political pressure. Until now, Congress has required only that tax-deductible dollars go to educational, charitable, scientific, or religious purposes.

If the diversity enforcers really believe that philanthropy should be colour- or sex-coded, here's a suggestion: Go out, earn some money yourself, and show the world how philanthropy should be done.